Billy Bunter (Character) - Comic Vine Billy Bunter No recent wiki edits to this page. Origin Billy Bunter was a selfish schoolboy attending Greyfriars School. General Information Billie Turf Fat Owl of the Remove Publisher Close This edit will also create new pages on Comic Vine for: Beware, you are proposing to add brand new pages to the wiki along with your edits. Make sure this is what you intended. This will likely increase the time it takes for your changes to go live. Comment and Save Until you earn 1000 points all your submissions need to be vetted by other Comic Vine users. This process takes no more than a few hours and we'll send you an email once approved. Save your changes Thanks, we're checking your submission. Whoah, whoah... slow down there. Thanks! Your changes are live! Some of your changes are live Because you're new to wiki editing, we sent your submission off to our moderators to check it over. Most changes are approved within a few hours. We'll send an email when it is. Once you've earned over points you'll be able to bypass this step and make live edits to our system. Until then, gain points by continuing to edit pages.

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Error Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School 30min a list of 96 titles created 28 Apr 2012 a list of 1320 titles created 20 Nov 2014 Title: Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School (1952–1961) 6.8/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Add Image Add an image Do you have any images for this title? 19 February 1952 (UK) See more » Filming Locations: Did You Know? Trivia Early episodes were staged twice for the benefit of child and adult viewers, usually at 3.30 pm and again at 5 pm. See more » Connections (Derby, UK) – See all my reviews You're either an all-out fan of the exploits of schoolboys Billy Bunter, Tom Merry, Jimmy Silver etc from the imagination of Frank Richards (Charles Hamilton) as I am, or you won't hope to understand the attraction at all.

This is especially esoteric stuff because it relates to the Greyfriars school stories by characters and events but compared to the Master's writings this is water compared to wine. With the technical limitations of 1950's BBC (or ITV) live TV programmes it's not really surprising, even now when these plays could be handled so much better from an acting and production point of view one's own imagination is always the best place to replay a favourite story. Although the shows were centred on the perfectly cast Gerald Campion in the tour de force role of Billy Bunter, he's (luckily maybe) never intruded upon my imagination when reading any of the original stories. Charles Hamilton (1876-1961) is in the Guinness Book of Records for having written more words in his lifetime than anyone else - the equivalent of 1000 full length novels. One of his many thousands of literary creations, Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School came to life in the Magnet, a weekly British boys story paper 1908-1940, and lived on in novels published 1947-1965 (although the last were ghosted by a substitute).

Although incredibly popular and influential at the time over the years since the '60's his star has waned, partly thanks to the changing times, but mainly due to his non-promotion by indifferent rights owners. With the result that now hardly anyone under 50 years old has even heard of Billy Bunter. The TV shows ran throughout the '50's, a testament to just how popular the stories were. A testament to the modern BBC in their zealous endeavours to bury or alter modern perceptions of the past up until 1970 (in other words, pre-pc) is their continued refusal to even consider releasing any surviving episodes. Why not just have done and burn the tapes then, or is letting them rot in the cans the favoured cheaper option? "Backing up Bunter" broadcast 9.9.56: Bunter has 200 lines to do for Quelch, but gets The Famous Five to help him write them out with the promise of a car ride later in the day for them all courtesy of his father's male secretary, Tregg.

The car doesn't turn up, but what does is that Bunter's father has been robbed of £5000, Tregg has vanished, and a strange surly person has taken moved into a cottage close to the school.... The ancient school porter Gosling, appears in this as very helpful, around 50 years old with (thinning) black hair - not quite how most people would have imagined him! Richards had used variants of this plot from the Magnet story paper of the '10's to a hardback book in the '50's, so at the time both young and old would have been on familiar ground! The earlier series of these shows were performed live twice, once for the kids, then later in the evening for their Dads. "Bunter on the Warpath" broadcast 7.10.56: A familiar story for devotees updated to include that new fangled invention, the wireless. Bunter given lines by Quelch plots revenge by stealing and temporarily hiding his Masters radio. Nasty pair Skinner and Snoop also given lines to do take revenge on Quelch by stealing and hiding his Beethoven gold medallion. The 2 threads converge into a satisfying denouement.

Young Melvyn Hayes played Skinner to the life, and yet it seemed that all of his later roles were nice guys. Liberties of course were taken with the original stories, settings, even characters to fit into a live 30 minute TV play, but it was a job done well enough to get my moderate applause half a century later. "Billy Bunter's Burglar" broadcast 27.6.1959: A much simplified re-tread of a favourite Magnet tale from 1928, where Bunter is snooping treacle in the middle of the night, in the dark bumps into the Fifth form master Mr. Prout, and punches him on the nose. Prout thinks that his obtuse and sometimes violent pupil, Coker, has committed the dastardly deed and has him marked for expulsion from Greyfriars.... This one has young David Hemmings miscast as a stuttering bespectacled George Potter and young Michael Crawford miscast as an unusually silent Johnny Bull, these two and everyone else revolving like admiring satellites around well cast thirty-something Campion as Bunter.

"Double Bunter" broadcast 3.6.1961: Basically a one-dimensional re-tread of a three-dimensional 1919 Richards story - Billy gets fed up at school and temporarily swaps places with his identical cousin Wally who's been staying nearby. What happens next is obvious to devotees, the character change in Billy amazes the natives. As it was broadcast live on TV, the 4 bits of film inserted into it meant valuable time for re-positioning etc! Campion as both of the Bunters was excellent and believable, even if playing the 15 year old Billy in his 30's. The rest of the "schoolboy" cast were pretty deplorable - they had to be as it was Campion's show from start to finish. John Melford as Mr. Quelch was the only big let down - much too soft and personable! Kynaston Reeves who had previously played him was miles better in the role, although by the end of his tenure in the role was losing interest and fluffing his lines a little. The BBC presented Campion with a 16mm copy of this episode when the shows finally ended in 1961.

To me and maybe about a thousand people around the world, wonderful garbage, to everyone else garbage. Isn't that enough people for the BBC or some company to release an expensive collectors edition DVD of the surviving episodes, as most of us fans would pay an awful lot of money to see these shows properly. 9/10 36 of 40 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes BFI Screenonline: Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School (1952-61) Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School (1952-61) BBC, tx. 19/2/1952-22/7/1961, 51 episodes across 7 series, black and white Joy Harington, Pharic Maclaren, Shaun Sutton, Clive Parkhurst Cast: Gerald Campion (Billy Bunter), Kynaston Reeves, Frank Melford (Mr Quelch) One of the first successes from the fledgling BBC Children's Department at the tiny Lime Grove studios, this comedy series was based on the stories of Frank Richards (real name Charles Hamilton).

Richards' tales of Greyfriars public school had appeared in the first issue of comic paper The Magnet in 1908, continuing until it folded in 1940. Billy Bunter stories continued in novel form thereafter, with this TV series arriving in 1952. The rotund Bunter was one of several boys in the class known as 'The Remove' year and his round face and horn-rimmed glasses earned him the nickname 'The Fat Owl of the Remove'. Mr Quelch was their formidable Form Master and among his pupils were Harry Wharton, Bob Cherry, Johnny Bull, Frank Nugent and Hurree Singh (an Indian boy whom the others referred to as 'Inky' - an unfortunate sign of the times). Plots centred around Bunter's plans to gain extra tuck, jam tarts and doughnuts being particular favourites, while the other boys made fun of Bunter's greed and size and played a variety of pranks on him - no viewers complained about this comic bullying. Perhaps the oddest aspect to modern eyes is the casting of an adult actor in a child part. Gerald Campion was 32 when he took the Bunter role and 40 when he retired.

Surrounding him were various teenage actors as The Remove, among them future stars Melvyn Hayes BILLY BUNTER and THE MAGNET, Bill's Paper Page finalised 9th October, 2010. Just ONE page on the Collecting Books and Magazines web site based in Australia. Would the real Charles Hamilton please stand up: truth, lies and the recreation of the boarding school story. A Paper presented by Bill Nagelkerke . bc [Abstract Charles Hamilton is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's most prolific writer, credited with over 70 million words, the equivalent of 1,000 novels. Under numerous pseudonyms (around thirty, including Frank Richards and Martin Clifford) he wrote thousands of 'boys' stories' ranging from tales of adventure in wilderness outposts to his better known school stories of Greyfriars and St Jims. His most (in)famous character was the egregious Billy Bunter who featured in over a thousand issues of the weekly The Magnet magazine as well as in books, comics, on television and the stage.

What made the Bunter stories in particular so popular and why, at the same time, did they become anathema to other writers and commentators, such as George Orwell? Why does Hamilton's writing continue to attract devotees who collect his work and share their enthusiasm over the internet? Forty years after the author's death what place do, or should, his contributions have in the history of children's literature, quite apart from their place in the history of the boarding school story. What debt, if any, does J K Rowling's Hogwarts School owe to Greyfriars?] My interest in this topic stems from a long held delight in the school stories of Charles Hamilton, particularly those written about and around Greyfriars School and its most famous inhabitants: the aforementioned Billy Bunter; the group collectively known, long before Enid Blyton's more famous quintet, as The Famous Five, namely Harry Wharton, Bob Cherry, Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, Frank Nugent and Johnny Bull; and their teacher Henry Samuel Quelch. This delight prompted me to ask why Hamilton's stories, for all their faults, still give such particular pleasure.

Could the reasons relate to, and perhaps even explain, today's popularity of J K Rowling's Harry Potter and the subsequent rejuvenation of the boarding school as a potent fictional location? Few children today know of, much less read, Charles Hamilton's school stories. The reasons for this are not hard to find. The name 'Billy Bunter', as noted in Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, is now synonymous with 'fat and greedy'. 'Any attempt today' writes Nicholas Tucker 'to build up a comic fictional character based on extreme physical oddity would probably be strongly opposed before it could take root in the popular imagination.' (1981, p.208) Billy Bunter as hero or, more correctly, anti-hero is everything that contradicts today's view of what is appropriate in literature for children. Bunter is an inveterate liar, at times a racist and consistently a thief. Edited versions of a handful of Billy Bunter titles published in the 1980s highlighted by their omissions the most alarming elements of the stories. Nonetheless, it's interesting to compare Bunter with the similarly obese Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter books.

As a character Dudley appears worse than Bunter by having been given, at least so far, few redeeming features yet no one seems to have taken Rowling to task for perpetuating this stereotype. In his now infamous commentary on Harry Potter, the author, critic and Whitbread Book Awards judge Anthony Holden tried to demolish both Rowling and Hamilton when he wrote of Harry Potter: 'I found myself struggling to finish a tedious, clunkily written version of Billy Bunter on broomsticks . .

Why on earth couldn't Hogwarts have been a comprehensive, or an embattled secondary modern or a solid old-fashioned grammar - a school of the kind with which most of those millions of young readers can identify?' (2000) Holden's criticism was replied to, acerbically, by William Boot in The Bookseller who called him 'petulant and snooty' (2000, p.25) and went on to say that his comments were 'fat-headed beyond belief, since failing to identify with a good old private boarding school is not readily observable among these millions of young readers.' In his favour Holden does imply, though, that Hamilton's stories were neither tedious nor clunky and he highlights the continuum between Hamilton and Rowling despite the chronological distance that separates them. As Boot points out, Harry Potter's readership extends far beyond the country where public schools were, and still are, such a distinctive institution. The same was true for Hamilton's tales of Greyfriars and St Jims, as letters published in The Magnet and The Gem attest. Hamilton's large cast of characters came, as did the magazines' readers, from all over the Commonwealth.

Tom Brown, epitome of the boarding school schoolboy, was the name given to the New Zealand representative at Greyfriars; and there is even mention made of the All Blacks in one Magnet story. (Moss, 1995) And that Bunter and his fictional schoolmates are still of interest worldwide is demonstrated by the existence of a Bunter Egroup, Hamilton web sites established in both Australia and New Zealand and by novels for adults that incorporate elements of the Bunter stories. (1) There are more serious criticisms, however, of Bunter than Holden's throwaway remark. Musgrave calls Hamilton's stories 'the worst examples of standardisation' (1985, p.223) of the school story genre (2). He censures Hamilton's writing largely for what he believes it does not offer, in particular change, development and explicit moral lessons. The realities of religion, sex, war, poverty and social class were, he says, left unmentioned. Nicholas Tucker wrote that '[Charles Hamilton] . . . had little time for subtlety . . . in his writing . . .

He depicts an utterly unreal world in his stories, cut down to the most narrow stereotypes and repetitive, ever-predictable situations.' (1981, p.123-124). Nonetheless, the reasons for the enduring appeal of the stories, albeit today mostly amongst collectors and aficionados, cannot be ignored, nor the reasons for their massive popularity in the first half of the 20th century when, at its height, The Magnet sold up to 250,000 copies each week. Some of the critics are on Hamilton's side.

'A greedy fat boy,' argues Beverly Lyon Clark, highlighting the contradiction at the heart of the Bunter stories, 'can subvert the straight-arrow, stiff-upper-lip values of a proper boys' school, a subversion particularly valued by a readership comprised of boys who were not themselves attending public school.' (1996, p.249) Jeffrey Richards goes several steps further when he says: '[Hamilton's] stylisation of language and the ritualisation of events, so often misunderstood by short-sighted critics who talk of standardisation and stereotyping, are necessary elements of myth.' (1988, p.274) The attempt in the 1980s to sanitize Hamilton's writing actually revealed one reason why the stories, for all their ideological incorrectness, were so good. Hamilton's writing style, deemed by some to be numbingly repetitive, is in fact highly idiosyncratic, difficult to imitate or indeed alter convincingly.

The following parallel extracts from the opening chapter of the two versions of Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School give an indication this: Chapter 1: Bunter knows!'Bunter!' Mr Quelch's voice was not loud, but deep.It was heard distinctly by all ears in the Remove form-room at Greyfriars School: excepting, apparently, one pair of very fat ears. Billy Bunter did not answer. It was the second time Quelch had called his name. Quelch seldom had to call on any boy in the Remove twice. Now he had called twice, and still in vain. Bunter was silent. There was a stirring in the Remove, as fellows turned their heads to look at Bunter, wondering why he did not reply. Really, it was not safe for any Remove man to pass Quelch by like the idle wind which he regarded not. Yet there sat Billy Bunter, staring straight at his form-master through his big spectacles, but otherwise not deigning to take the slightest notice of him!(Richards, 1968, p.5) Chapter 1: Bunter knows!'Bunter!' Mr Quelch's voice was not loud, but it was deep.

Every pair of ears in the form room heard it - every pair, that is. But one. Billy Bunter's fat ears must have been closed, for he didn't answer. This was the second time that Quelch had called Bunter's name, and the other members of the Remove stirred uncomfortably, one or two of them risking a glance at the fat Owl. To ignore Quelch was to risk life and limb, and yet the Owl simply sat at his desk, staring silently at his form master through his large, round specs.(Richards, 1982, p.1) Jeffrey Richards sums up the appeal of Hamilton's unique style when he writes: '[His] repetitions have the regular, ritual cadences of . . . the Authorised Version or the classic nursery rhymes, creating a form of speech which is a texture of catch phrases, has the recurrent elements and limitations of ordinary speech but gives the effect of a litany.' (1988, p.274-275) What of the readers' themselves?

Musgrave's suggestion of a moral vacuum in Hamilton's writing is strongly denied by Robert Roberts in his book The classic slum, a study of working class life in Manchester at the turn of the century. He writes: 'Even before the first world war many youngsters . . . had developed an addiction for [Charles Hamilton's] school stories . . . schoolboys and some young teenagers strove . . . to conform [to the standards of conduct]' of the characters. (1971, p127) Brian, born in 1951 and growing up in a small, economically depressed community, was one of the readers who emailed me with their reasons why they enjoyed, and continue to enjoy, Charles Hamilton's writing. He believes that 'the working class of the inter-war period appreciated [Hamilton's] portrayal of a moral society.' And he adds: 'My main interest has always been the way [Hamilton] uses language.

For someone of my background, interested in literature, it was splendid to meet a boy's author who would suddenly quote Virgil or Fenimore Cooper.' Steve contributed the following: 'Reading about a group of young boys who really looked out for each other was a vicarious way of interacting with others and sharing their adventures . . . to me [the age of the stories] didn't show. What did . . . was the strength of characterisation in the writing. I was . . . a bit on the chubby side, but never felt any anger towards the portrayal of Bunter.' Sandeep, who now lives in the United States but grew up in India, said: 'I first read [Hamilton's] books as a 12 or 13 year old in Bombay . . . and enjoyed them immensely . . . I am of the opinion that . . . [Hamilton's] . . . work . . . imparts a significant set of values to their readers . . . values such as honesty, integrity, loyalty, fairness, respect and facing determinedly up to adversity (3). . . The same cannot be said of a lot of what kids read today. . .

During our school days, one of the reasons we read [Hamilton's] books . . . was to improve the quality of our English . . .' Sandeep also makes an interesting comment on the Indian member of The Famous Five, Hurree Jamset Ram Singh who, he admits, is a caricature, but nonetheless 'is treated very differently from . . . other foreigners - he is credited with a lot of brains, he is often mentioned as being very "sharp", he is . . . the best bowler in the Remove, and he plays a rather important role in many stories . . .' Tony lists some reasons why he enjoys the Bunter stories. 'The schooling is similar enough to my own for me to relate to it, but different enough to be interesting . . . there is a never ending supply of changing stories . . . the writing style is comical and brings a smile.' David writes: 'It's the outrageous and totally unbelievable Billy Bunter and the serpentine and stereotypical plots that make these tales classics.' Pete says: 'I discovered Greyfriars around the age of 9 . . . now . . .

my bookshelves sag beneath the Howard Bakers (4), the framed map hangs above the mantel, and my email address [Friardale, a village near Greyfriars school] speaks for itself.' I will return to the map later. Jonathan, aged 14, talks about how he was introduced to the Greyfriars stories because of their apparent similarity to William and Jennings. But he sounds a cautionary note: 'I wouldn't take me in any way to be typical of my age,' he writes, 'as I don't really know anyone else who would dream of even looking inside one of the books.' Jonathan is not alone however. Another Jonathan, journalist Jonathan Wilson, describes giving a Billy Bunter novel to his sixth-grade son: 'Like a few million kids before him, my son found the Bunter books very funny. I heard him laugh out loud while he was reading, which doesn't happen all that often. My son is no egghead; he is . . . fully American in his interests and activities.

Like most Americans he prefers talking to reading.' (1995, p.98) Raja, originally from Sri Lanka, emailed: 'I first entered the enchanted world of Greyfriars as a 7 year old in 1948 . . . Since then [Charles Hamilton] has had me in thrall.' Given the vastly different cultural, moral and social landscape of today compared with the inter-war years, we would expect the values identified by Roberts in The classic slum to have less relevance in the 21st century. But, taking into account the feedback from present day readers, this is clearly not a given. However, while these values may still sometimes be important, it is equally clear that moral imperatives are not, and cannot, be the only reasons for the lasting appeal of the stories. Mary Cadogan, Hamilton's biographer, writes: 'Even if the author's assumptions about adolescent honour and decency and clean-mindedness were somewhat inflated, readers responded to his irresistible enthusiasm, his comic use of the high-flown simile . . .

and to his charismatic characters.' (1986, p.61) The stories are funny, often in a slapstick, exaggerated cartoon way; they are linguistically and referentially challenging at the same time as being reassuringly repetitive; they subvert; they offer, as Raja said, entry into an 'enchanted world.' Ultimately, their success is dependant on them being not only timely, but timeless. Bunter's Greyfriars is as much a fantasy creation as Harry's Hogwarts. 'Landscapes,' according to one writer, 'are . . . constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock.' (Schama, 1995, p.61) Hamilton, who never attended a public school, invented the rules for the landscape he constructed much as Tolkien did for Middle Earth, Lewis for Narnia and Rowling for Hogwarts. I want to explore in a little more detail this fantasy aspect of the Greyfriars stories.

One of my email correspondents disagreed with my suggestion that Hamilton created a fantasy landscape that both echoed the real world at the same time as distanced itself from it but, interestingly, Robert Roberts in noting how the standards and ideals of the stories 'conditioned the thoughts of a whole generation of boys', also conceded that the Greyfriars code of conduct was something of a fantasy. 'Greyfriars,' he wrote, 'gave us one moral code, life another, and a fine muddle we made of it.' The 'simple tales' were 'distorted into myth'; the characters were 'unsullied by [the] early cares of adolescence . . . [a]nd that was how we wanted it.' (1971, p127) George Orwell, for all the hostility towards Hamilton's writing contained in his famous essay on boy's weeklies, almost got it right when he wrote: 'It is well worth getting hold of some copies of The Gem and The Magnet . . . simply to have a look at the correspondence columns. What is truly startling is the intense interest with which the pettiest details of life at Greyfriars and St Jim's are followed up . . .

It is clear that many of the boys and girls who write these letters are living a complete fantasy-life." (1968, p.469) What Orwell could have acknowledged, of course, was that these readers were prepared to suspend their disbelief and enter wholeheartedly into the world of Greyfriars in the same way that readers of other fictional worlds are prepared to do, particularly those readers of modern fantasy and, indeed, followers of long established television soap operas. Over an enormously long writing career Hamilton was so successful in creating a local habitation and a place that the Kent where Greyfriars was situated became at least as real as the real thing. Food parcels were even sent to Bunter at the non-existent Greyfriars.

In issue number 1,546 of The Gem the editor is forced to say twice in the same issue: 'St Jims and Greyfriars are fictitious schools.' And: 'I cannot send you the autographs you want as the characters are fictitious.' (1937, p.17) Margery Fisher, summarising Hamilton's 70 million word output in two paragraphs calls Bunter 'a freak in a comic-fantasy world.' (1975, p.46) Robert Kelly, writing in The Saturday Book of 1964, is a little more circumspect, and kindly. He writes: 'It is not generally realised today that The Magnet featured within its pages every type of story possible in a school or holiday setting without resorting to the fantasy of visits to lost valleys filled with prehistoric monsters, invisible schoolboys, magic potions, or feats of superhuman strength. If there was a touch of fantasy about the Greyfriars scene it was merely of the type that made the settings and characters seem a little larger than life.' (1964, p.150) This is not strictly true.

At least one sequence of Bunter stories contains magical elements that make it more akin to a Harry Potter tale (5), and the larger than life aspects of the Greyfriars stories often take on extraordinary proportions to match the physicality of Billy Bunter himself. Kelly goes on to say that 'Bunter, with his sublime ignorance both in education and in sport, his constant thefts of food, his transparent lies, and his postal order which never arrives, . . . can take credit or blame for liberating The Magnet from the constricted public school story code . . . his contempt for authority in all its guises, coupled with a refusal to recognize his own modest place in society [makes] Bunter . . . a Walter Mitty with the energy and nerve to bring his fantasies to life.' (1964, p.154). Indeed, nowhere is this more apparent than in one particular sequence of stories, collectively known as 'Bunter Court' series published between July and September 1925, at the beginning of the classic Bunter period when Hamilton focused all his energies and talent on The Magnet, and stories by substitute writers ceased.

The abstract to the story in issue number 910 is revealing and worth quoting in full: 'Bunter Court exists only in the imagination of Billy Bunter. His schoolfellows are tired of hearing about the host of footmen, the Rolls-Royce cars, the horses, the gorgeous picture gallery, the gardens, lake, etc. But Bunter is determined to convince his doubting Form-fellows that Bunter Court does exist! From "fancy" comes the first stone of the "ancestral" home, the beginning of a great "reality!" ' (1925, p.3) The eight Magnets that follow chronicle Billy Bunter's litany of lies that enable him to obtain possession of a country estate and, at the same time, reveal how Hamilton managed to make this extraordinary deception believable. Bunter, he writes, 'would have liked to be a lord, but the next best thing to that was being taken for a lord. (1925, 910, p.7) . . . Bunter, to do him justice, was quite unconscious of any wrongdoing in his conduct.

He was so in the habit of considering only his own interest and advantage that it hardly occurred to his fat mind that anybody else had any claim to consideration at all. (1925, 910, p.18) . . . consequences never bothered him till they came along.' (1925, 910, p.20) . . . He was simply unable to realise that any other inhabitant of the globe had any rights or interests as important as his own . . . Bunter regarded the world as his oyster, which he had to open somehow.' (1925, 912, p.12) The fantasy here is presented as something not only external (Bunter's possession of the country estate), it is also internalised in Bunter's amoral world view which blinds him to social mores and generally acceptable conduct. Bunter is the quintessential anti-hero, who thinks nothing of incarcerating butlers and estate agents in the wine cellars in order to retain his fraudulent tenancy of the so-called Bunter Court.

That the reader is prepared to accept all this for the duration of the story is due only partly to Bunter's deviant psychology; it is also because of the acquiescence modeled by other characters, especially the upright, honest Famous Five who are completely taken in, and (and this may be the strongest reason) because we, the reader, enjoy Bunter's short-lived life of misrule. Society with all its conventions is riotously, albeit temporarily, overturned and we can partake vicariously while still expressing our indignation or outrage by switching sides when Bunter's house of cards comes tumbling down. What could be a more sublime, and subversive, fantasy than this? Hamilton the man was something of an enigma, little known during most of his lifetime, until George Orwell's article, which cast doubt on the singular authorship of the stories in The Magnet and The Gem, engendered a reply by Hamilton, and made him, as it were, an overnight success. Hamilton's reticent autobiography omits his childhood and most of his teenage years.

Because it contains such scanty details about these formative years, and because it is written in the third person, Hamilton becomes a rather shadowy, shaped, character in a story that is more biography than autobiography. This feeling is reinforced by Hamilton's decision to use his best-known pseudonym, Frank Richards, when talking about himself. He thought of himself, in fact, more as Frank than Charles. A curious and somewhat convoluted extension of this distancing act occurs in Val Andrews detective novel Sherlock Holmes and the Greyfriars School mystery. (1997) Here the 'author as character' becomes a 'character as author'. Dr Watson, as an old boy of Greyfriars, enlists the help of a retired Holmes to recover Mr Quelch's stolen 'History of Greyfriars.' What they uncover instead is that the austere schoolmaster, Bunter's nemesis, is moonlighting as a writer of boy's stories under a host of pseudonyms including that of Frank Richards!

'I can assure you,' the teacher says, 'that Henry Samuel Quelch is my real name, although I have told my publishers that I am one Charles Hamilton.' (1999, p.170) What Hamilton's autobiography does reveal is a portrait of a genial, reserved man, cosmopolitan, egalitarian, vulnerable, whose true story lies hidden like a palimpsest beneath and between his endless lines of print. Which is perhaps why his characters also remain essentially on the borders of credibility, larger than life stereotypes or archetypes depending on the individual reader's point of view. In Hamilton's life story one can glean the possibility of a doomed romance, the struggle to adapt to a loss of physical resilience, a man who gambled away his considerable wealth in Monte Carlo and, for a time after the war, was in considerable financial difficulty. One of the perverse delights of Hamilton's stories is in following his characters to the brink of dissolution. Wealthy schoolboys fall prey to compulsive gambling, blackmailers, money sharks and, in Bunter's case, food.

The nice boys we can like, admire even, and try to emulate, but we also identify with the wicked ones; we sink with them and sometimes rejoice in their ultimate redemption. Except they are never really redeemed. In the next set of stories they fall again. Bunter's Promethean quest for tuck, for instance, is everlasting, always fulfilled and always unfulfilled. It is tempting, if perhaps a little hyperbolic, to suggest that the Greyfriars stories are a kind of Mystery Play, embodying the temptation, fall and redemption, and that in them we hear an echo of our human situation, our personal cycle of growth, decay and renewal. Hamilton himself would have baulked at this: in a poem prefacing his autobiography he wrote simply of his motive for writing: 'And if my tale give pleasure, /And ease the daily task, /And charm an hour of leisure, / Then what more need I ask?' As early as 1915, in The Magnet issue 409, a map appeared of the Greyfriar's environment. Already in this early attempt we see a start to the codification of a landscape Hamilton had been fictionalising for just eight years.

The apotheosis of this codification came in 1965 when a much more detailed map was produced for the Holiday Annual of that year. The importance of maps in fiction is that they both resemble and dissemble. In mimicking a geographical map they suggest that a kind of truth is contained within the map boundaries, 'beyond which lie dragons'. Yet ironically, nothing portrayed on a fictional map is really real and what lies outside the frame, and therefore outside the narrative, is actually the 'real' world. Children's literature is, of course, full of maps although we are still waiting for one of Hogwarts. Whoever charted the highways and byways of Greyfriars in the County of Kent, England, was trying to suggest that this world was tangible and authentic. Yet the very act of framing it revealed it to be, instead, fantastic and mythic. The immutability of the stories, cited by Orwell as their major flaw (Orwell, 1968, p473), is actually a natural consequence of the mapping and framing process. The elements of fantasy and myth, I think, are ultimately the only explanations for the permanence of Hamilton's stories.

True, individual readers have found other reasons, but in the end what has made the work enduring is our understanding that it is unbelievable and, therefore, able to be believed; non-existent and therefore ever present. The stereotyping and standardization identified by Musgrave and the archetypes posited by Richards are both true; over time one has alchemised into the other. In the classic Bunter stories we can enter an 'enchanted world', one that bears only a passing resemblance to the world we experience every day. This was shown to be only too true when in 1979 Humphrey Carpenter published a children's novel called The Captain Hook affair. In this story two children Lizzy and Jack encounter characters from children's literature through the device of a magic pencil. One of these characters is a strangely emasculated Billy Bunter whom Jack takes out of his familiar environment of Greyfriars into a late seventies Britain. The episode generates a feeling of disconnection, the dissonance between the immediately pre-Thatcher world and that of timeless Greyfriars being simply too great: taken from his familiar frame of reference, Bunter no longer fits. If Charles Hamilton is little known today, he and his writing deserve to be remembered.

His school stories in particular were well written and widely read. In Billy Bunter Hamilton created a character repulsive yet instantly memorable. As with Rowling's Harry Potter books the best of the Bunter stories are strong in characterisation, humour, setting and complex plotting; they are part of, but at the same time subvert, a long tradition, of which Hogwarts is but the latest manifestation. It comes as no surprise really that Harry catches the Hogwarts Express at the beginning of the school year. Each term the Greyfriars schoolboys arrived at their school via either Courtfield or Friardale railway stations. Hamilton wrote that in 'his own considered opinion . . . he has done a good job, and has been a useful citizen . . . He is proud to know that his writings were read in the trenches in one war, and in the Western Desert in another. But his pride and his pleasure is to write for young people, and he is content to live and die a Boys' Writer - Billy Bunter and he are inseparable till death do them part!' (1962, p174) Notes ( ) 1. A recent example is 'Sherlock Holmes and the Greyfriars School Mystery' by Val Andrews.

The web site addresses are: (New Zealand site) and (Australian site). 2. Although he admits that Hamilton 'will always be remembered for his creation of two schools with two sets of boy characters, namely those of Greyfriars and St Jims schools.' 3. Values that come across equally strongly in J K Rowling's work, shown particularly in Harry's determination to overcome his many adversities. 4. Publisher of The Magnet facsimilies. 5.'Bunter the Tough Guy of Greyfriars' combines a number of stories from The Magnet featuring a magical elixir that transforms the normally indolent and physically incapable schoolboys Alonzo Todd, and then Bunter who steals the formula, into colossi of strength. At one point in the narrative a perspicacious character says: 'Sounds like jolly old magic, doesn't it?' (1965, p.80) References Wellred Weekly: Vol. 1, No.

9 - Bunter Bunter by Februs If one is looking for vanilla works of fiction that feature no shortage of corporal punishment then one need look no further than the series of comics and books that feature the character of Billy Bunter, a fictional pupil at Greyfriars School. The character was created by Charles Hamilton, or Charles Harold St. John Hamilton to give him his full title, using the pen name Frank Richards. In the vast majority of Billy Bunter stories one is likely to find at least one caning, usually carried out by the pompous, gimlet-eyed form-master, Mr Quelch. Charles Hamilton had originally created the character along with a series of sketches in 1899 but his work wasn't accepted and remained unpublished. Several years later, however, Bunter was resurrected when in 1908 the editor of The Magnet, a new weekly boys' story paper published by Amalgamated Press, invited 'Frank Richards' to write for them.

The very first issue was published on February 15th, 1908 and was to continue being produced until 18th May 1940 by which time no fewer than 1,683 issues had been published. Of those it was believed that Hamilton wrote around 1,380 of them with the remainder being completed by 'fill in' writers. It appears that the main reason for The Magnet ceasing publication was a shortage of paper that occurred during the Second World War. In 1946 the publisher, Charles Skilton, read an article entitled 'Do you remember Billy Bunter?' which was featured in the Picture Post and he subsequently contacted Hamilton, who was then 70 years old, to propose that he continue the Bunter stories in hardback book format. He agreed and proposed his usual fee of 30 shillings per thousand words but Skilton suggested royalties instead which worked out very well for Hamilton who went on to receive ï¿½1,000 rather than the ï¿½90 he would have accrued.

The first book, Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School, was released in September 1947 and Skilton went on to publish a further nine before selling the rights to Cassell who published another 29. What then of the actual character of Bunter himself and his surroundings? According to Hamilton, the inspiration for Bunter was derived from three actual people: a corpulent editor, a short-sighted relative and a second relative who was forever trying to secure a loan on the basis of the anticipated receipt of a cheque. Initially, Bunter was not a major figure within the Greyfriars stories of The Magnet but it was not long before Hamilton realised the comic potential of the character and he soon became the focal point of many of the stories. Weighing in at around 14 stones Bunter's main physical characteristic is one of obesity, brought about specifically by over-eating. He is also distinguished by short-sightedness and wears round glasses, his short-sighted squint and weight resulting in his frequent description as 'the fat owl of the Remove', the 'Remove' being the name given to the Lower Fourth form at Greyfriars.

In terms of his personality, one would have to describe him as something of an anti-hero, having been referred to as "dishonest, greedy, pathologically self-centered, snobbish, conceited, lazy, cowardly, mean-spirited and stupid"! Despite his negative attributes he nevertheless manages to appeal to the reader by virtue of the humour he generates and due to the fact that his various schemes never succeed and inevitably result in punishment. At school the majority of his time is taken up with devising means of pilfering food in order to support his insatiable appetite and he shows little, if any, interest in anything else, including classwork and sports. When not actively engaged in some scheme to acquire food he is more than likely to be trying to raise a loan on the basis of a postal order that he is perpetually expecting but which never turns up. His speech is notable for a series of frequently repeated catchphrases.

These include his invariable opening line, "I say you fellows"; his reply to criticism, "Oh really Wharton" (or whoever is speaking); his characteristic giggle, "He, he, he"; and his exclamation of pain, "Yarooh" (which is "hooray" spelled backwards). In 1940, in an essay entitled Boys' Weeklies, George Orwell described him as... ...a real creation. His tight trousers against which boots and canes are constantly thudding, his astuteness in search of food, his postal order which never turns up, have made him famous wherever the Union Jack waves. Going on to say... Billy Bunter, for instance, must be one of the best-known figures in English fiction; for the mere number of people who know him he ranks with Sexton Blake, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes and a handful of characters in Dickens. The books were initially illustrated by R.J. Macdonald who had been one of the most prominent illustrators of the old Gem, a story paper for which Hamilton had also written stories. Following his death in 1954 the art work was carried out by C.H.

Chapman, who had originally worked on 'Magnet' and had been the first to depict Bunter in his check trousers. An example of a typical Bunter yarn can be found in the 28th book in the series of hard backs, Bunter Out Of Bounds. Here, a fellow pupil has knocked over the form master, Mr Quelch, but has managed to escape without being recognised in the fading light. Bunter foolishly boasts that he was responsible which then comes to the attention of Quelch. He is then sentenced to be flogged in front of the entire school: Mr. Quelch opened the door with one hand, and propelled Bunter outside with the other. In the corridor, he released the fat Owl. "Now go!" he rapped. "But I-I-I- never---" "You are to be flogged to-morrow, Bunter," said Mr. Quelch, in a grinding voice, "and I am therefore reluctant to cane you to-day. But if you utter another untruth, I shall cane you severely. Now go." At this point Bunter makes his escape, remains out of bounds for a number of days, returning only when the real culprit has been forced to own up.

Unfortunately, he is then overheard saying he would up end Quelch soon as look at him and the inevitable ensues... "What did you say, Bunter?" "Oh! Nothing, sir! I-I mean, I-I-I didn't mean I'd up-end you as soon as look at you, sir-I-I-I-" "Follow me, Bunter." "Oh, lor'!" Billy Bunter did not look like up-ending Quelch, as he rolled away sadly and sorrowfully into the House after his form-master. From Mr. Quelch's study window floated a rhythmic sound of cane contacting trousers, accompanied by a series of anguished squeaks. And Billy Bunter, bending over, rather wished that he was still Out of Bounds. Another example featuring Bunter on the receiving end can be found in Billy Bunter the Bold: "You have deliberately darkened your eye with soot, to give it the appearance of a black eye, and have ventured to play this insensate trick in the form-room - to play this trick on me! On ME! I shall cane you for this foolish prank.

Hand me the cane from my desk, Bunter." A dismal fat Owl handed Quelch the cane from the desk. It swished in the air. "Now bend over, Bunter, and touch your toes." "Oh, lorï¿½!" "Yow - ow - ow! Wow! Oh, crikey! Wow!" Mr. Quelch laid down the cane. "Now go out and wash your face immediately, Bunter." "Yow - ow - ow - ow!" Bunter's creator, Charles Hamilton, died on Christmas Eve, 1961 by which time he appears to have penned at least 70 million words although there are higher estimates of 90 and 100 million words widely quoted. Based on word count he is commonly thought to be the world's most prolific author and as such has featured in the Guinness Book of Records. There is, however, some doubt in regards to whether Hamilton wrote all the stories that are attributed to him. At the time of Hamilton's death, the initial publisher of his hard back series, Charles Skilton, wrote a letter which suggested that there were only two more books yet to be released but the publishers, Cassells, went on to publish another seven.

The 38th and final Bunter book in the Cassells series appeared in 1965, four years after the author's death. It was originally to have been entitled Bunter to the Rescue, but being the last of the series it was eventually re-titled Bunter's Last Fling with the agreement of Mrs. Una Wright, Hamilton's niece and literary executor. Those closely familiar with Hamilton's work appear adamant it was not written by him claiming that the whole appearance of the prose is different and some have further suggested that it is in fact the work of his niece. Whoever the actual author of this last Bunter publication actually was, it is encouraging to see that it was very much business as usual: "You may go, Vernon-Smith. Bunter!" "Ow! Oh lor'! Oh, crikey! I-I didn't take those cigarettes-" "Bend over!"

Question: Comic schoolboy Billy Bunter was a pupil at which school?
Answer: Greyfriars